1 Enter the word you want in lower
case and when it appears in pink, mouse over it to hear it spoken as often
as you want. Please note that full stops cannot be included in an entry,
e.g. "a.w.o.l." is entered as "awol". Each word is individually
pre-recorded and no form of synthetic speech is used. You can compare multiple
entries by entering them separated by semi-colons, eg cat;cut;cart. Both
American and British spellings are provided.

2 [Addendum Nov 17, 2011:
Entries are researched using authoritative sources including dictionary.com,
m-w.com, Merriam-Webster Unabridged, Oxford Learner's Dictionary, forvo.com,
Macmillan Dictionary, GREdic.com and many others, including specialist fora.
We generally look for evidence confirming a given pronunciation from at least
two sources, in the form of sound files and/or IPA transcriptions. My own
background as editor of howjsay is summarised
here.]

3 Pronunciation is in Standard
British English, with World English alternatives (see also para 6 below).

4 The dictionary shows the closest
cluster of letters that it has to your request - for example "furious"
used to return "curious". Accents and full stops are not
recognised.

5 The lexical corpus includes
all of the General Service List (Bauman and Culligan 1995 version).
This is a collection of 2,284 commonly used English words. More
words will be added progressively, selecting them on the basis that
most non-native speakers of English would be unlikely to pronounce a
selected word in a universally understandable way without first hearing
it spoken by a native speaker. Another source of new words is you: unsuccessful
searches are automatically considered for inclusion. [Addendum
May 13, 2007: this last source has, it turns out, swamped all others.]

6 Where alternative pronunciations
are given, they are either

a widely used World English alternative
(Eg "cóntroversy" versus "contróversy").
In these cases the first alternative is the recommended one,
on the basis of its having the widest acceptance globally,
although in many cases the second alternative is equally common -
choose the one with which you're most comfortable - or

the weak version of the pronunciation
- Eg "some" pronounced
[s + schwa + m]. In most of these cases a brief context
is provided (Eg "some" as in "some bread"; "have"
as in "They've gone") or

two different pronunciations corresponding
to two different parts of speech (Eg "close", which is entered
as "close, verb or close, preposition") or to two different
meanings (Eg "bow", which is entered as "bow, as in
bow tie, or bow as in ship's bow").

[Addendum: Sep 23, 2006: Some familiar American
alternatives are also given. If they are not widely used outside
the United States, they are prefixed with the words "Also American..."
(Eg "Also American: [t + schwa + meidou]").]

7 Profane language and erotica are excluded from
the dictionary in the interests of child learners. [Addendum: May 22, 2010:
they are now to be included, by popular demand and also because it seems
narrow-minded to arbitrarily censor the corpus in this way].

8 No phonetic transcriptions are provided in
this dictionary, for two reasons: firstly, the public seldom uses them
and when it does so is often misled by them; secondly, any transcription
will always be an inferior imitation of the original sounds. Transcriptions
were necessary in the age of the book, because books cannot speak. [Addendum
May 30, 2007: we nevertheless developed our
own phonetic alphabet for annotation purposes, designed for speed,
conciseness and flexibility using a standard computer keyboard.][October
14, 2009: You can nevertheless see a phonetic transcription for the
commoner entries by clicking on the "define your entry here"
link].

9 This dictionary will be a work in progress
for many years to come, so please do not condemn it yet for its limited size.
Judge it rather on the entries to date of high-frequency words such
as "do" or "has". And please feel free to criticise,
report errata, and make suggestions.